The three that stuck out the most to me, that I very clearly remember, and hurt my trust:
Early in the pandemic, it was claimed that masks were not required. It was later admitted that this was to help the shortage, at the expense of the truth, and somewhat at the expense of the public [1].
President Biden went on national TV and bluntly stated, "If you get vaccinated, you won't get COVID." This was fiction, even at the time, with fact checks pointing it out the same day. [2]
Then later, "If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.", also fiction at the time, as the fact checks the same day pointed out [3]. There was no science to back this idea that vaccinations significantly reduced transmission, as it wasn't part of Pfizers tests [4].
Apparently related, some FDA officials resigned [5].
Things stated as fact that never should have been, and no attempt to correct it later, is what did it for me. There were many more small things that, appropriately, hurt my trust, and I feel a little crazy that people don't remember much of this.
There were a bunch of things in the past month or so that flipped the pandemic narratives in general, I'm thinking that made people start to question the rest. Here's some others:
* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.
* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.
* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.
The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effectiveness of masks by the public (although there was some evidence with earlier respiratory infections that mask use by the public is beneficial).
But instead of just saying that, the message from the vast majority of public health officials (and media types like Sanjay Gupta) was that "masks don't work for the public". It's not hard to go back to March 2020 and find lots of videos to this effect. This all spectacularly backfired a couple months later when health officials told everyone to wear masks.
And what made me slightly angry was that many officials tried to say something like "well, we have new data now". Which was somewhat true, but also conveniently swept over the fact that there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public", but health officials didn't have a problem saying that in public earlier.
How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.
WHO really dragged their feet before admitting that (1) it is a pandemic, (2) masks work and people should use masks, and (3) aerosols are the primary mode of transmission. They have been a notable source of misinformation themselves.
There has been an alarming pattern of public health communication throughout the pandemic: public official (Fauci, WHO official, CDC Director, President, Governor, etc.) makes assertion A about COVID, questioning of assertion A is harshly criticized as anti-science, racist, right wing, wanting to kill grandma . . . Six to twelve months later, the same public health establishment admits not only was assertion A not true, but it was never believed by said establishment.
Most blatant examples:
- Masks are not protective
- The vaccine prevents infection (entire basis for mandates)
- There is no evidence for lab leak
- Natural immunity is not as effective as vaccine immunity
Your entire paragraph of "if you've paid any attention" are questionable.
I never heard people get mocked at any point for wearing a mask during the pandemic, even in the beginning when the CDC said it wasn't necessary.
In my PERSONAL opinion, the "lab leak" theory was never misinformation, but uninformation: Discussion pushed forward by right-wing outlets to generate an enemy, a "they" to blame. They used it as a cudgel without evidence against Anthony Fauci, and they beat the shit out of Asians because of it. Most importantly, it was completely irrelevant to the extent of us debating it, when the focus was on containing a disease for which there was no cure or vaccine.
And while there was some public skepticism about the pace of the vaccine process, I likewise don't think there was a "switch-flip" of trust in it like you suggest. When it came time to take it, everyone who wasn't a vaccine skeptic already went to get it when they could, and clearly the Trump admin was in charge through the development of the vaccine.
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There is also a difference between someone posting "I do not trust the government not to be incompetent, or not to run a mass trial on people" (though I think those people are nuts re: the vaccine), and someone saying "I know that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci put microchips into a bone-melting serum that will activate in a year!"
It's a huge, multi-faceted issue. In the end, the problem to TRY to solve in coming years will be sifting between legitimate skepticism and good-faith debate, and nation-states/Fox-News lies that intend to manipulate you into anger and division, and whether private entities have the obligation to allow harmful information across their channels.
> Conspiracy proponents act like the lab leak theory being true is some game changer. It's the stupidest thing.
On the virus issue specifically, here are three mainstream narratives that have been largely up-ended, and if you were in tune with a variety of viewpoints you would have been exposed to for your own conclusions before they became mainstream:
- "Coronavirus" was an immense threat and it was wise to prepare for it arriving and turning into a pandemic. Government actions to cut it off eg by banning travel was warranted. (Promoted in Jan 2020 in certain circles, discounted by consensus)
- Being a likely airborne pathogen, wearing masks (particularly N95s) was wise. (Promoted from Jan, in March the surgeon general and others claimed there was no reason to wear masks.)
- Given the proximity to the lab the idea this came from the lab was a worthy explanation worth investigating. (Promoted from March by my recollection)
For me, I was wearing a medical-grade mask in stores and stocking up on supplies in January 2020 due to my exposure to this information with a relatively open mind. I don't discount the possibility that, given that I have advanced lung disease, this priming reduced my prior probabilities of catching and even dying from this pandemic. I was mentally a few weeks ahead of the narratives I read in the media throughout this pandemic and made a variety of decisions around risk management that were in conflict with what felt like the average consensus. This doesn't mean I was confident in these theories per se, but when you're forced into making risk adjusted decisions having a diversity of ideas swirling in your head opens the possibility of having a better risk calculus, esp if the goal is to be conservative.
Here are some things that I thought that at the time were called "misinformation", "conspiracy theories", and had "no data to support that claim":
Jan. 2020
- The illness in China is much worse than the Chinese are letting on
- The Chinese government is disappearing whistleblowers
Feb. 2020
- The illness in China will become a global pandemic
- The only way to stop the pandemic is to act immediately and enforce full international travel bans, inter-state lockdowns, and invest heavily in virus testing
- COVID-19 is far worse than the flu
- The illness is already in the US even though there aren't confirmed cases yet
Mar. 2020
- People need to withdraw from public life if they can
Apr. 2020
- There is a significant chance that the virus was partially studied or modified in a Wuhan laboratory
Mar. 2021
- The vaccines clearly lead to side effects in certain cases, including neural effects, heart problems, and interactions with the reproductive system
EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas. These ideas, now common knowledge, were derided as misinformation and anyone who believed them were mocked as ignorant at best and deliberately fear-spreading at worst.
I am not fully anti-vaccine; I had the first dose of Pfizer and later had my spike antibodies tested. I haven't had any positive COVID-19 tests because I locked down until eventually taking the vaccine.
I don't care about the idiots you know, I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
Reading that article, all I can think of is the bald-faced lies the public was told during the pandemic because they were convenient for steering behavior. My trust in “science” was seriously damaged by that episode.
The same thing happens with e.g. Fauci's mask remarks from March of 2020. Somehow people pretend like that was the fatal communication sin of the whole pandemic and the reason there's little trust in the medical community and they ignore the months and months of downplaying the virus and just an endless stream of disinformation from literally everyone else in the administration in service of trying to get reelected.
Awesome! Articles like this forget that early on, "misinformation" included the idea that masks worked or that COVID was airborne. And for a shockingly long-time, the idea that COVID could have come from a lab leak.
Vaccines obviously work, and vaccine misinformation costs lives, but in order to properly censor you need an actually trustworthy source of truth, and I'm unconvinced that society is currently capable of that.
Here is a montage of various vaccine "leaders" making statements ranging from the vaccines completely stopping the spread, to you being unable to catch COVID with the vaccine. [1] Some people, sometimes, made accurate statements. But by and large misinformation and hyperbole were the rule rather than the exception.
Accepting and approaching this is very important, because while some may simply want to forget many of the things that happened, others never will. And so it will only further galvanize the differences and divides between people. What should be done instead is to consider why such statements were not only made, and not only left unchallenged, but in most cases - actively encouraged. And what we could do to help have a better outcome next time.
There's relatively little doubt that the past years have shattered confidence in many US institutions (public and private...), and that's not really good for anybody. Repairing that damage can only happen once the past is reconciled in a way that everybody can feel generally positive about.
The most interesting part is here (Keep in mind that this is the National Library of Medicine):
> The designers of this pandemic anticipated a pushback by the public and that major embarrassing questions would be asked. To prevent this, the controllers fed the media a number of tactics, one of the most commonly used was and is the “fact check” scam. With each confrontation with carefully documented evidence, the media “fact checkers” countered with the charge of “misinformation”, and an unfounded “conspiracy theory” charge that was, in their lexicon, “debunked”. Never were we told who the fact checkers were or the source of their “debunking” information—we were just to believe the “fact checkers”. A recent court case established under oath that facebook “fact checkers” used their own staff opinion and not real experts to check “facts”.[59] When sources are in fact revealed they are invariably the corrupt CDC, WHO or Anthony Fauci or just their opinion. Here is a list of things that were labeled as “myths” and “misinformation” that were later proven to be true.
The asymptomatic vaccinated are spreading the virus equally as with unvaccinated symptomatic infected.
The vaccines cannot protect adequately against new variants, such as Delta and Omicron.
Natural immunity is far superior to vaccine immunity and is most likely lifelong.
Vaccine immunity not only wanes after several months, but all immune cells are impaired for prolonged periods, putting the vaccinated at a high risk of all infections and cancer.
COVID vaccines can cause a significant incidence of blood clots and other serious side effects
The vaccine proponents will demand numerous boosters as each variant appears on the scene.
Fauci will insist on the covid vaccine for small children and even babies.
Vaccine passports will be required to enter a business, fly in a plane, and use public transportation
There will be internment camps for the unvaccinated (as in Australia, Austria and Canada)
The unvaccinated will be denied employment.
There are secret agreements between the government, elitist institutions, and vaccine makers
Many hospitals were either empty or had low occupancy during the pandemic.
The spike protein from the vaccine enters the nucleus of the cell, altering cell DNA repair function.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed by the vaccines and many times more have been permanently damaged.
Early treatment could have saved the lives of most of the 700,000 who died.
Vaccine-induced myocarditis (which was denied initially) is a significant problem and clears over a short period.
Special deadly lots (batches) of these vaccines are mixed with the mass of other Covid-19 vaccines
What has been interesting with Covid is what would be considered “disinformation” has changed.
At the beginning, saying you should wear a mask was “disinformation”. Then saying that the virus could have leaked from the Wuhan lab was “disinformation”. Then saying you might need a booster vaccine was also “disinformation”.
Exactly. It pissed me off to no end when at the beginning of the pandemic the health minister of my country mindlessly parroted WHO in their initial "masks do not help" stance. How can anyone treat what we are being told seriously when instead of telling us the truth (masks help, but please don't hoard them because we need them for first responders) they choose to lie in the simplest things.
Same thing with real numbers of people that suffer issues after receiving covid vaccines. The only countries I know of that are truthful in this is UK (their yellow card scheme) and USA(VAERS database). Anyone can see that in UK there were around 500 deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination (20 mln people vaccinated) and in US around 1000 last time I checked (for 60mln vaccinated). Anyone can search those databases and compare incidence of for example vascular issues, stroke, or anaphylaxis to their "natural" incidence in the population. However, in my country where we have 5mln people vaccinated half of people are fearing "death by vaccine" because "few cases of stroke" are linked to the vaccine. Coincidently there is no open database of issues. Clearly politicians think people are too stupid to be told the truth that the likelyhood of "death by vaccine" is extremely low as compared with "death by covid" in pretty much all age groups. Instead of presenting real numbers they claim "there is no risk" in taking the vaccine.
Additionally people stopped believing the bullshit they hear after hearing multiple "experts" telling us various versions of:
"uv will kill covid so it'll end by the summer"(then brasil had huge outbreak), "children do not get ill", "children do not pass the disease to adults", "you can't get infected outside or if you keep 2 meters distance" "no need for masks at work if you can maintain 2m distance". Then a year later: "we're closing nurseries and schools because despite teachers being vaccinated we see high numbers of children spreading covid to their families" and "40% of covid transmission happens at workplaces despite adherence to measures put in place". One doesn't need to be a genius to understand those were lies of convenience and wishful thinking. I seriously hope politicians in charge will be brought to justice after this pandemic ends.
A lot of people were extremely confused during the pandemic and that's why they couldn't differentiate between actual verifiable information being shared and some random newscaster saying, wrongly, that vaccines prevented infection. A few years later they don't even know what is true anymore.
> The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.
Yep, I repeated this so many times that toward the end I started just insulting people for not knowing.
It used to be common to reply to this sort of fear mongering with "anecdotes aren't data." Cool anecdote, bro.
Sorry for that person you, a random internet person I have no reason to trust, allegedly know, who is very, very unlucky.
The people in power want us to stay afraid and easy to control. Fauci says vaccines work but doesn't trust them enough to stop going into public with TWO masks! Despite being vaccinated!
Why would I get a vaccine that doesn't quell the fears of "the nation's top doctor" enough for him to stop wearing the masks? Or are the masks just for show?
We may still be in a pandemic but it's time to stop panicking, face the danger, and get on with society and our lives before we cause bigger problems like famine societal breakdown!
Some people may die of COVID in the process, but someone is going to die no matter what choice we make, from deprivation, from isolation, from side effects, from economic distress
COVID might suck but there are far worse things, I think it's safe to say, after a year, this thing isn't Ebola.
Now commence downvoting to show you disagree! Surely it will change my mind this time!
I feel like bending into that with increased dishonesty only makes that worse though. There's only a 'gotcha' if you change your mind while pretending you were never wrong, if you explain what evidence changed your mind then there's not that much power in pointing out 'flip-flopping'.
But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong...
The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...
IMO the loss of credibility doesn't come from getting things wrong, but by blatant dishonest behavior. Here's two examples off the top of my head.
The US Surgeon General, CDC, WHO, etc. got on national television and said masks don't work when what they appear to have really believed is that masks DO work, but they wanted to reserve them for healthcare workers. The cost of this dishonesty is that when they flipped the script people were less likely to comply/believe them. And any recommendations they give going forward has to go through the "Are they sacrificing me for the greater good" filter.
When the question of whether COVID is lab generated is brought up, the relevant institutions consistently respond in a dishonest manner. They pretend that "lab generated" means gene editing and they vociferously deny the gene editing hypothesis. But that's not what is being asked. What's being asked about is gain of function research.
These things are categorically different than something like "I think if they closed the borders sooner we would've had less impact." That might fall under "not performed perfectly" and I'm willing to grant a lot of leeway for that category of error under emergency circumstances.
Early in the pandemic, it was claimed that masks were not required. It was later admitted that this was to help the shortage, at the expense of the truth, and somewhat at the expense of the public [1].
President Biden went on national TV and bluntly stated, "If you get vaccinated, you won't get COVID." This was fiction, even at the time, with fact checks pointing it out the same day. [2]
Then later, "If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.", also fiction at the time, as the fact checks the same day pointed out [3]. There was no science to back this idea that vaccinations significantly reduced transmission, as it wasn't part of Pfizers tests [4].
Apparently related, some FDA officials resigned [5].
Things stated as fact that never should have been, and no attempt to correct it later, is what did it for me. There were many more small things that, appropriately, hurt my trust, and I feel a little crazy that people don't remember much of this.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...
[3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-its-not-news-nor-...
[5] https://docs.house.gov/meetings/VC/VC00/20220429/114682/HHRG...
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